Alex Kralie
Alex Kralie can't seem to stop provoking murderous blondes. Canon history Back in the summer of 2006, in Helena, Alabama, Alex Kralie was working on a student film. It was some pretentious, poorly-scripted thing called Marble Hornets, but it's important because it was what brought Alex and his friends to the attention of the Operator. The memory loss started. Film tears and static messed up shot after shot. His dog was found dead on his lawn. Alex became incredibly paranoid and started filming himself at all times, because he realised that that worked as a semipermeable protection against all the lost time he seemed to be experiencing lately. Even though he still forgot a lot, having a record of events seemed to preserve the memory of them. And what a memory they preserved. He filmed a thin, impossibly tall man, with no face but sometimes many arms, appearing everywhere, chasing Alex in a very literal sense. That was the Operator, and he'd decided to stalk Alex and wipe the crew's memories and basically screw with the lot of them. The rest of the Marble Hornets crew, including Tim and Alex's friend J, were various degrees of worse off than Alex. All of them saw the Operator, but none of them remembered it. Their memories became so full of holes that Alex barely recognised them any more. He'd been good friends with a couple of them, J especially, but now just looking at them reminded him of the Operator, of the horrible shit he was doing to them, of the way he was messing with all of their heads and ruining Alex's life. He couldn't deal with that. He finally cancelled the shoot after three months, and kept his distance from the others, becoming incredibly reclusive. By now he had bags and bags of tapes, recording the project from inital location scouting to abandonment, and recording Alex himself, who'd soon ended up filming himself at all times. He wanted to burn them, but J talked him into handing them over instead. Alex agreed on the understanding that J never mention them again - that hell, he probably shouldn't tell anyone. (Later, J respected Alex's wish by uploading all the juicy bits to Youtube.) Then Alex left. He ran away, skipped town, screw his degree; dropped contact with everyone involved in the project and escaped. He hid his film equipment away and pretended the summer had never happened. For nearly four years, he thought he'd escaped; but then his girlfriend Amy found his old camera deep in the closet, watched the staticky tape in it, and turned around to find the Operator standing in their hallway, head tilted sideways like a hanged man. Alex and Amy ran. Amy got out of the house - and Alex was snatched into Wonderland. Entranceway history History When Alex first woke up in the mansion, he was convinced that the Operator was to blame. All the time was time to freak out, and he spent some time in the mansion grounds confirming that no, there really was no way to get out. After asking around a bit, and ascertaining just how some other people had gotten there, he started to doubt his initial hypothesis: perhaps the truth was closer to the widely-accepted but no more comforting "this shit just sort of happened". With impeccable timing, the fear event started only a couple of days after his arrival. Curling up for three days in a sleepless ball in the corner really did nothing for the state of his nerves. He let off some steam after the event by yelling at the forest for half an hour, though he wasn't sure whether or not he'd really seen the Operator there amongst those trees. Dr. Sofia Lamb, who'd given him one of her school-counsellor talks on his arrival, took it on herself to tow him back to the mansion - and talked him into telling her about the Operator, albeit in broad strokes that left her thinking he was an ordinary human stalker. It was probably around this point that poor Alex became one of Sofia's projects. If he'd bothered to do more networking, he might have found out that she was bad news, but Alex was more inclined to do paranoid-person things like lock himself in his room and pull cameras out of the closet. After his experiences with the Operator, he wasn't about to assume he'd gotten free of the guy. Tim arrived in the mansion, muttering about being in Alex's closet, which did little to ease Alex's mind. He exchanged words with the guy, but decided to stick to his old policy of "avoid like hell". When J zeefed in at about the same time, their conversation was longer but no less disquieting. J revealed that he'd inherited the role of stalkee - then admitted that he'd uploaded footage of the Operator to Youtube. As far as repairing their relationship went, it was several steps backward. Alex also met Pikachu, which sort of blew his mind. The next event rolled around, and suddenly everyone was related; Alex gained about a hundred siblings, including Masky; Sofia and Delta as parents; and J as, of all things, a boyfriend (which neither of them were happy about when they came back to their senses). And he lost his paranoia. Wonderland gave everyone false memories of a life lived entirely at the mansion; and there was no Operator at the mansion, meaning no Operator in Alex's past. He got out more. He started making films again. He held meaningful conversations with more different people in those three days than he had in the fortnight since his arrival. Unfortunately, one of those people was Diogenes Pendergast, J's temporary dad. J had lied to him, and like all healthy and balanced people, Diogenes decided that the best way to teach one's son a lesson is to kidnap and drug his boyfriend. The evidence was beginning to suggest that Alex's milkshake brought all the psychos to the yard. For Alex, being frightened always translates sooner or later into getting angry, and after the event, when Sofia stopped him from trying to get his poorly-thought-through revenge on Diogenes, he knocked her down. It was an accident, but that doesn't excuse it. It did force him to cool down a bit, though. He ended up contacting Benny Stango on her advice, trying to get some kind of justice done. He also managed to contact Masky, who he knew from the event as Markus. The resulting conversation scared him badly, and convinced him that the Operator was definitely at the mansion. He warned J, and told Sofia to stay out of the crossfire. Her idea of "staying out" was to turn up at his door with a DNA-bending wonder drug and tell him all about how it would let him defend himself. Alex was in a scary, helpless place right then, shaken by his encounter with Diogenes and the prospect of the Operator's presence; and as well as that, he'd come to trust Sofia. He fell for her spiel and spliced up with Winter Blast. He only found out afterwards that he couldn't pull EVE hypos out of the closets, because he'd only found out about them since arriving at the mansion; he'd have to rely on Sofia for them, unless he could barter some from the vendors. Plasmids As of the end of June, Alex is a splicer. This means that he has injected a Plasmid, made with a drug called ADAM, which gives him a supernatural ability. He was at least warned of the risks, if you consider "ADAM will hurt you if you take too much but you can totally regulate it and avoid side-effects" a warning. He's being very careful of his intake, and only wields Winter Blast (the ability to shoot frost from his hand which freezes things solid). Disregard that, MirrorLamb sucks cocks. He's more full of plasmids and crazy than a hole is of empty. Disregard that, Sinclair... actually did him a favour by shooting him dead. When he resurrected, no more plasmids. Even More History He put Winter Blast to good use! Well, he froze Bhamba's bloody crocodile, anyway. And that is never a waste of time. He (along with several other people from the Mansion) was kidnapped by the Queen at some point after that, with the absolutely delightful side-effect of having her steal all his memories of home and feed them to the Mansion. (He got better.) I'm sure we can all appreciate just how happy he was when he found that out. He didn't have a great deal of time to fret about it, though, since a few days after his clueless return he had a run-in with Sofia Lamb's mirror double. See, the mirrors were invading the mansion to distract everyone from the Queen's plan going south, and MirrorLamb? Really had a thing for leaving people souveniers. Mostly this involved poisonous snakes, but for a couple of lucky people it extended to free Plasmid samples! Lots of free Plasmid samples, whether the recipients liked it or not. Cue Alex's reign of crazy, which started with chasing J around the Mansion's hallways and culminated in bees in Sofia's room, freezing Masky and throwing Hypnotise at Sinclair. ...No, actually it culminated in a blown-up bathroom with Alex's head full of Sinclair's bullets, but that's if you want to be picky. Relationships *Dr. Sofia Lamb: A friend who he trusts trusts in general but wouldn't take asprin from. *Mirror Lamb: A regular feature of his nightmares. *J: Dickweed. *Tim: Guiltttttttttt. *Masky: GUILLLLLLTTTTTTTTTT. *Augustus Sinclair: Dick''weeeeeed''. *Subject Delta: So apparently this guy is dangerous. *Diogenes Pendergast: OHGOD KILL IT WITH FIRE *Dr. Bhamba: Mostly a dickweed. See also: fucking crocodiles. External Links *Alex's application @vitaelamorte *Alex's (not exactly exhaustive) page at the Marble Hornets wiki *List of Alex's logs Category:Marble Hornets Category:Characters